62 Walking

I had begun walking—for exercise but also as meditation. In the summer of 1985 I replaced my nightly savasana meditation with this daily exercise, a fast walk, a "power" walk, of five miles on the sidewalks of my neighborhood or around the track of the local high school.

I had gotten fat.

I followed my breath, watched my step, and tried to maintain my balance and rhythm. I introduced mantras as I walked. The word "peace" was the one I most often repeated in my head, turning it into a word of two syllables, the first on the inhalation, the second on the exhalation, two steps to the in breath, two steps to the out breath. Despite my intention, on some days I walked ten or twelve city blocks and had already worked up a sweat before I remembered the word "peace"; on other days it was the word in my mind my first step out my front door; but it was never long before my discursive thinking, usually on job, marriage, and family, would arise to displace it; and I might walk a mile or two before I would remember the word I had vowed and determined to maintain in my mind with my breath. Eventually I dropped the repetition of the word "peace" and adopted instead on the inhalation the nonsense syllables "dee doo," the tip of my tongue on my dental palate making the "d, " and on the exhalation "hey ho," the puff of my breath through my pursed lips making the "h." I didn't vocalize, there was only the loud, heavy whisper of my exertion, and I heard the repetition of this nonsense only in my head, my step and my breath fixed in a harmony.

Two steps to an inhalation.

"Dee doo."

Two steps to an exhalation.

"Hey ho."

Audible breathing.

"Dee doo."

"Hey ho."

"Dee doo."

"Hey ho."

My commitment to this walking meditation was much more difficult than lying on my back and following my breath before sleep. Winter weather was a big obstacle and deterrent and—counting also my getting ready, my cooling down, and my cleaning up—my five-mile walk demanded two hours of my time every day. More than once I skipped this exercise for months, twice even for nine months, yet over the next twenty years my walking meditation was a regular part of my life.

I praise it.

"Dee doo."

"Hey ho."

"Dee doo."

"Hey ho."

Sometime in the mid-1990s I read books by Thich Nhat Hanh in which he recommended returning often to our breath and making what he called a half smile in our normal daily activity, and he recommended using common sounds and sights—red lights, green lights, bird calls, clouds, sirens, horns, scratches, bumps, blood, running water, thunder, lightning, rain, sunrise, sunset, insects, babies, sneezes, yawns—as reminders to do so.

To "wake up" to the preciousness of life.

To be kind.

This practice I immediately adopted and dozens of times each day, some days perhaps hundreds of times, I remembered my breath—as I had learned from Thich Nhat Hanh—and I would bring my attention to my inhalation and exhalation and smile what I imagined to be half. It felt like a way of remembering life. It felt like a way of remembering death. It felt like a way of remembering life and death and to do no harm, to do good, to serve all beings, and to honor the precepts I still recited to myself every morning when I awoke.

My habit still was to look everyone with whom I spoke in the eye. To do so had always come natural to me and after the reinforcement that I had received in 1972 from John I now did it without thinking. To many the practice was disconcerting, I was often reminded, just as it had at one time been to me.

"Why are you looking at me?" I was sometimes asked.

Oops—

"I'm sorry!" I would stammer. "I was just—"

I would shrug.

"Looking."

Though I suspect it was invisible to everyone but me myself, my experience in 1975 had changed me to the core. From age twelve to age thirty-two, I wanted to be cool. Now I wanted to be good. Though I didn't call it religion, I thought every day about what others call "the religious life. " Not a day went by that I did not think about it and about my effort to practice it.